Valedictory Address, Master Sheng Yen
Bristol Chan Group Memorial Service
Feb 15th 2009, Chuan-deng Jing-di, John Crook
"Gaté gaté paragaté parsamgaté. Bodhi Svaha."
Here we have the great mantra of the Heart Sutra but today it is Shifu who is "gaté gaté - Gone Gone" and we meet together to mourn this great loss. He has been my personal guide and our patron for many years. Perhaps also he has been the greatest Zen master of our generation. Not only has he introduced Chinese Zen throughout the world, spoken diplomatically with the Dalai Lama thereby helping to integrate differing approaches to the Mahayana, attended conferences of World religious leaders at the United Nations but, most importantly, he has brought together the Chan teachings into a fresh unitary lineage at his monastery of Dharma Drum.
Chan Master Sheng Yen, June 2008
Yet the mantra ends with "Bodhi Svaha" - Wisdom arise! So at this time we must also bow in gratitude for the life of this man, a simple monk who has thought so deeply about the problems of humanity. Together we need to renew our focus on the great teachings he has left us and recall the long lineage that he has continued into our time.
Perhaps for us in a British Sangha, one of the most important aspects of his teaching has been the clarification of problematic issues arising from the history of Zen's arrival in Europe. Shifu was able to help here following his long solitary retreat and his subsequent period of research in Japan. The great Daisetz Suzuki, right until near the end of his life, only presented to the West the approach of the Linji school (Jap: Rinzai) of Japanese Zen in which koans and hua-tous are the prime methods used during meditation. When eventually the West discovered the Caodong (Soto) school, some arguments developed about what was proper Zen. This dispute had arisen in China in ancient times between monasteries competing for support and subsistence. The stories are well known. We find them in the Platform Sutra and again later, in the apparent disputes between Masters Hong-zhi and Ta-hui. We now understand that although there were political motives undoubtedly involved, the prime issue was merely a preference in meditation method - there was no fundamental dispute at the level of Dharma. Indeed, while disagreeing about method, it is clear that Ta-hui and Hong-zhi were friends. Never the less, these divisions in lesser minds promoted a dispute that has come down to our time. Shifu examined these issues carefully. Already in Japan, under the leadership of Master Harada, an approach integrating these schools was developing and Shifu had attended retreats with a successor of Harada, Master Bantetsugyu. He was therefore aware of the need for reconciliation.
When I received transmission in 1993 Shifu gave it to me in the Lineage of Linji, saying that that was the only lineage with an intact sequence of names. Further research, however, enabled him to correct our understanding of the Caodong lineage. Since Shifu himself was teaching and offering retreats using methods from both schools, Silent Illumination from Hongzhi and Hua-tou from Koans from Ta-hui, he then created an integral lineage including both approaches and updated my own transmission. This is the Dharma Drum Lineage, containing both Linji and Caodong, which we inherit from him today and within which both Simon and I are Dharma Heirs. (See further, Li, Rebecca (ed) 2002. Chan comes West. Dharma Drum Publications)
A further Dharma clarification has arisen from Shifu's meeting with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, going a long way to sort out a long stand-off between Tibetan and Chinese Buddhism and restoring Dharma good will between them. This is very helpful for those of us who have additional interests in the Tibetan approach.
I have been so fortunate in my life to have met such a teacher. Shifu was so alert, so focussed and at heart so deeply compassionate, yet often very strict and confronting in his personal teaching. When I first met him he introduced his retreat with such bleak authority that I wondered whether it had been wise for me to come. Yet, I soon realised this was a front to get participants truly focussed on the seriousness of their endeavour. Shifu could be quite a trickster. As he said when he first came to The Maenllwyd, that he had come not so much to give us enlightenment, that was ridiculous, but to show us how confused our minds were! He was very good at that.
On my first visit to New York I had told him about the Western Zen Retreat. This interested him and we had much discussion about it. After I had done several retreats with him, he agreed to come over to Wales to teach us. What a privilege! After that, the best we could do was to create the Bristol Chan Group to continue with what we had learnt. I have so many memories of Shifu: kindness itself; humour; profound thought and mutual delight in conversation; sudden rejection of my mistakes; sometimes quite fierce confrontation leaving me angry and disturbed until I suddenly saw his point and dropped my egoic reaction. What insights, what teaching! Sometimes he taught very indirectly leaving me to puzzle over what had happened between us. This was very insightful, causing me to reflect again and again until I got the point. I am still getting it today!
To illustrate Shifu's style, I will use a story I recently received concerning an encounter experienced by an early student, Merrick Lex, at the Queens' meditation centre in New York. Lex wrote:
"I continued to study with Shifu when he visited NYC. In either late '79 or early '80 the building for Dharma Drum Meditation Centre had been purchased, and we started to fix it up. One day, Shifu took me to the picture window downstairs and asked me to open up the old metal security grate that was spanning the window. I did that and we saw that the window was completely covered with grime and grease. It was a depressing sight. "I want you to clean that window up," Shifu said. He took a single edge razor blade out of his sleeve where he had been hiding it and gave it to me. I looked at the tiny blade and then at the huge window and must have looked pretty forlorn, but I set to cleaning it up. After many hours of scraping and wiping with rags, I finally had it cleaned up and spotless both inside and out. I was standing and admiring my work, when Shifu came in and asked me to get to work on the basement.
When I next came to the building about ten days later, somebody had painted the old metal grate with bright gold paint. Shifu asked me to take a look at it with him, then he asked me to open up the grate again. When I opened it, I discovered that the painter had not taken care to cover the glass window, which was now splattered with blobs of gold paint from top to bottom. My beautiful clean window! I turned around with a look of shock on my face. Shifu was only smiling at me for a moment, then, he slowly took the razor blade back out of his sleeve, handed it to me, and walked away in silence. I was filled with surprise, frustration, and finally humour and burst out laughing. Then I set to work to scrape the whole window again! And so it went with my greatest teacher!"
Shifu has followed a long tradition and left us his final verse at the close of his will. It reads:
Busy with nothing, growing old
Within emptiness, weeping and crying
Intrinsically, there is no "I"
Life and death, thus cast aside.
There is so much one could say about this verse. Some of us may 'get it' immediately. Others may not yet be ready for it. For me, it reveals both the clarity of his being and of his teaching. Rather than talking about its inherent philosophy, I would like to present a brief prose-poem written earlier that seems to sum up my feeling as I read what he has said. This poem symbolizes Shifu's gift of clarity that is always available for us. Let us open ourselves to his clarity and then sit for a little while with it - as it were under the light of the Moon.
"Knowing the full moon was shining and the hoar frost sharp, I went out in to the garden closing the door on the yellow light of the room behind me. Suddenly, a different world; silent, frozen literally into stillness, everything either dark or silvery bright where the moonlight landed, black shadows looming where it did not reach. Looking back at the house now massive in these contrasting shades, it seemed a presence as if unknown to me - as if I were some stranger in a realm often available but seldom visited. Surrounded by stars, some brilliant against deep black, some tiny almost blinded by the moon, Orion was hanging in its iconic place: a great spread of sky constrained by lines, shades, shaped shadows and the sheer bulk of the emptied house; the bird seed holder so far below, motionless, without a visitor; no one there, simply a witness to where the vast silence of outer space touched down upon the lawn."
